Install and use Better Delete Revision WordPress plugin

In this article I'll be showing you how to install and use the Better Delete Revision plugin for WordPress. This plugin will allow you to clean up and remove old page and post revisions that are no longer needed in your WordPress database.

By default WordPress after version 2.6 started storing revisions of all pages and posts in the database. While this can be great if you happen to make a lot of edits and lose some content, if you have a lot of needless revisions stored in your WordPress database this can be inefficient.

If WordPress revisions don't sound like something you need for your website, I'd recommend also reading my article on how to limit or disable WordPress revisions which goes more in-depth explaining WordPress revisions and also walks you through adjusting how they work.

Install Better Delete Revision WordPress plugin

Using the steps below I'll walk you through how to install the Better Delete Revision WordPress plugin on your WordPress site.

You should see all of the duplicate WordPress page and post revisions stored in your WordPress database on the next screen. You can then click on Yes, I would like to delete them! (A Total Of 12) to remove those stored revisons from the database.

You should then see that the found duplicate revisions were deleted.

If you go back to the Better Delete Revision Manager page, you can also click on Optimize Your Database to check if any of your WordPress database tables should be optimized.

In this case we can see that none of our tables are marked red, so they don't need to be optimized. If you did have any tables that need optimization, you can just click on the Optimze WordPress Database button.

After it's done the plugin should display a message of Optimization of database completed!

You should now understand how to install and use the Better Delete Revision WordPress plugin to help clean up your WordPress database from saved WordPress revisions.

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According to WordPress, this plugin has not been updated in over 3 years, and is only known to be compatible up to WordPress version 3.1.4. (WordPress is currently at version 3.6+.) I wonder if you have a better or alternate plugin to recommend.

There is now a notice on the site about the Better Delete Revision that this plug-in is unavailable and advising people not to use it until a new version is available.

From the WordPress Plug-in page "PLEASE, DON'T USE IT UNTIL VERSION 2.0 BECAUSE IT IS AFFECTED BY A BUG THAT CAN POTENTIALLY DELETE OTHER STUFF IN SOME RARE CASES.
I'm sorry and I hope to get it safely works soon.

You might want to take a look at Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions plugin. It deletes the revisions, runs automatically, cleans up pages and orphans, tags and a lot more. It also allows me to exclude tables from cleaning by selecting the table. It cleaned up a heck of a mess for me tonight and I've set it to delete all but 1 revision and run every day.

Just so you know I was testing out the Better Delete Revision plugin to update this article with a warning, and it looks like it actually got updated today!

So it would seem the developer has removed the warning and the plugin page is showing it compatible safely with versions up to the latest 3.9.1. I downloaded the latest version and ran the process described in this article again on a WordPress site and I didn't encounter any problems.